After the suicide of the West

By Roger Kimball | Volume 24, January 2006<= /span>

“It looks as if I= slam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought… . Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still = stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.= 221;
—Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s Greenmantle

Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.
—James Burnham, <= i>Suicide of the West

It seemed fitting that a symposium devoted to the subject of “Threats to Democracy” should convene on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalg= ar. Not only was it one of the greatest sea battles in history, but it was also= a battle greatly pertinent to the questions that guided our deliberations: Wh= at is the nature of the threats to democracy, to the culture and civilization = of the West, and how can we best respond to those threats? <= /p>

Let me say at the outset that I = believe that Lord Nelson had the right idea—sail boldly in among your enemy’s ships, start firing, and don’t stop until you’ve reduced them to a shambles. It was good for England and for the rest of Europe that the Duke= of Wellington proved himself to be of like mind a few years later. “Hard pounding, gentlemen,” he said at Waterloo. “We’ll see who pounds longest.”

Today, I believe, there is a wid= ely shared understanding that our culture—not just the political system of democracy but our entire western way of life—is at a crossroads. That perception is not always on the surface. Absent the un= ignorable importunity of attack, absorption in the tasks of everyday life tends to bl= unt the perception of the threats facing us. But we all know that the future of= the West, seemingly so assured even a decade ago, is suddenly negotiable in the most fundamental way. The essays that follow highlight some of the principle = features of those negotiations. In this introduction, I want simply to revi= ew some of the moral terrain over which we are traveling.

I believe that Irving Kristol got it right when, in the early 1990s, he res= ponded to the euphoria and naïveté that greeted the fall of the Soviet Union. Many commentators announced the immin= ent arrival of a new era of peace, brotherhood, international comity, and enlightenment. Kristol was not so sanguine. In = an essay called “My Cold War,” he wrote that

There is no “after t= he Cold War” for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers.

The oft-noted linguistic i= rony about the “liberal ethos” that Kristol fears is that it has very little to do with genuine liberty and everything = to do with the servitude of statist ideology.

That ideology comes in a range of flavors and a wide variety of wrappings. But t= he essential issue is one that Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, anatomized as “democratic despotism” and that Friedrich Hayek, harkening back explicitly to Tocqueville, laid out with clinical brilliance= in The Road to Serfdom. Quoting Tocqueville on the “enervating” ef= fect of paternalistic democracy, Hayek notes that “the most important chan= ge which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of a people.”

One of the most penetrating medi= tations on the nature of that alteration is James Burnham’s book Suicide of the West. Written in 1964, that book, like its author, is largely and unfairly forgotten today. Burnham’s was a first-rate political intelligence, and Suicide of the West is one of his most accomplished pieces of polemic. “The primary issue before Western civilization tod= ay, and before its member nations, is survival.” Suicide of the West is very much a product of the Cold War. Many of the examples are dated. But as with Irving Kristol’s Cold War, so with Burnham’s. The field of battle may have changed; = the armies have adopted new tactics; but the war isn’t over: it is merely transmogrified. In the subtitle to his book, Burnham promises “the definitive analysis of the pathology of liberalism.” At the center of that pathology is an awful failure of understanding which is also a failure= of nerve, a failure of “the will to survive.” Liberalism, Burnham concludes, is “an ideology of suicide.” He admits that such a description may sound hyperbolic. “‘Suicide,’ it is objec= ted, is too emotive a term, too negative and ‘bad.’” But it is part of the pathology that Burnham describes that such objections are “most often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.̶= 1;

By way of illustration, let me r= eturn for a moment to Lord Nelson and Trafalgar. For anyone concerned with the fa= te of our culture, our civilization, the anniversary of Trafalgar was full of lessons. I wonder, for example, what Nelson would have thought of the Royal Navy’s decision last summer to reenact the battle not as a conflict between the English on one side and the French and the Spanish on the other but, out of sensitivity to the feelings of the French, as a contest between= a Red Team and a Blue Team. Today, I suppose, Nelson, instead of broadcasting= his famous message about duty, would have had to hoist the signal that “<= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">England= Expects or at Least Suggests That Every Person No Matter What Gender, Race, Class, Sexual Orientation, or National Origin Will Be Politically Correct.” = Hard work on the flag officer, of course, but preserving the emotion of virtue is not without cost.

Trafalgar is full of lessons. Wh= en my wife and I visited London last September, we took our young son, a fervent admirer of Nelson, to Trafalgar Square to see Nelson’s column. We were surprised to see that it had company. On= one of the plinths behind the famous memorial sat a huge sculpture of white mar= ble. This, I knew, was one of the benefactions that Ken Livingstone, the Communi= st mayor of London, had bestowed on his grateful constituency: public art on Trafalgar Square that was more in k= eeping with cool Britannia’s new image than statues of warriors. From a distance, the white blob looked liked a gigantic marshmallow in need of an = air pump. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be a sculpture of an armle= ss and mostly legless woman, with swollen breasts and distended belly. In fact= , it was a sculpture by Marc Quinn of one Alison Lapper, made when she was eight months pregnant. Ms. Lapper, who was born with those horrible handicaps, is herself an artist. Asked how she felt about the sculpture, Ms. Lapper said = that she was glad that at last Trafalgar Square recognized someone who was no= t a white male murderer. It is worth noting, as one journalist pointed out, that the architects of Trafalga= r Square were ahead of their time in at least one sense, for the sculpture of Ms. La= pper represented the second commemoration of a seriously disabled person. After = all, there is Nelson on his column, missing his right arm and an eye.

How England chose to commemorate = the Battle of Trafalgar and to respect its most public acknowledgment of Lord Nelson’s service to his country should give us pause. The union of sentimentality, political correctness, and multicultural piety is a disturb= ing ambassador to the future. It is a perfect example—one of many—of the “liberal ethos” whose progress Irving = Kristol mournfully observed and whose essential character Burnham delineated. =

What are the stakes? The terrori= st attacks of 9/11 gave us a vivid reminder—but one, alas, that seems to have faded from the attention of many Western commentators who seem more concerned about recreational facilities at Guantanamo Bay than the future of their towns= and cities. For myself, ever since 9/11, when I think about threats to democrac= y, I recall a statement by one Hussein Massawi, a fo= rmer Hezbollah leader, which I believe I first read in one of Mark Steyn’s columns. “We are not fighting,= 221; Mr. Massawi said, “so that you will offer= us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”

It is worth pausing to reflect o= n that statement. The thing I admire most about it is its pristine clarity. You kn= ow where you are with Mr. Massawi. It requires no special hermeneutic ingenuity to construe his meaning. And you also know th= at he wasn’t speaking idly. He was a man of his word, as the events of 9= /11 and the names Bali, Madrid, and—just last summer—London remind us.

Or so one wo= uld have thought. Mr. Massawi speaks clearly, but who is listening? Our colleges and universities have be= en preaching the creed of multiculturalism for the last few decades. Politicia= ns, pundits, and the so-called cultural elite have assiduously absorbed the catechism, which they accept less as an argument about the way the world sh= ould be as an affirmation of the essential virtue of their own feelings. We are = now beginning to reap the fruit of that liberal experiment with multiculturalis= m. The chief existential symptom is moral paralysis, expressed, for example, in the inability to discriminate effectively between good and evil. The New York Times runs full-page advertisements, signed by all manner of emine= nt personages, that compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, the pop singer Michael Jacks= on spends an unspecified number of millions to finance the construction of a mosque in Bahrain “designated for learning the principles and teachings of Islam.” Thanks, Michael.

Over the years, The New Crite= rion has commented often on “the culture wars,” the vast smorgasbord= of intellectual, political, and moral havoc bequeathed to us by the 1960s. Wha= t we see now is a darker face of those conflicts. On the one hand, you have peop= le like Mr. Massawi, and their name is legion. If American Airlines will lend them a 767, they will happily plow it into the = most convenient skyscraper. Should they somehow get hold of a vial of anthrax or smallpox or an atomic weapon, we can be sure they would have not the least hesitation about obliterating whatever seat of Western decadence was most r= eady to hand—an American target would be best, of course, but failing that almost any other city would do. So far, Mr. Massawi and his pals have had to do without atomic or biological weapons, but they = have kept themselves busy with semtex, car bombs, an= d the occasional televised beheading.

All this violence is not aimless= . It has a clear goal, not only to push the West out of Saudia<= /span> Arabia and other parts of the Middle East but also to establish the rule of Sharia, of Islami= c law, wherever Muslims in any number have congregated. This is the condition that= the Egyptian historian Bat Ye’or has called <= span class=3DSpellE>dhimmitude: the state of the dhi= mmis, the “protected” or “guilty” non-Muslim people in a Muslim world. Dhimmitude outlines the official = status of a conquered, spiritually cowed people, people, as the Koran puts it, who= are allowed to live unmolested as second-class citizen= s so long as they “feel themselves subdued.”

I think we know where we are wit= h the Mr. Massawis of the world. But how do we react?= Well, the U.S. and British armed forces act in one way. Our intelle= ctual and cultural leaders, by and large, act in quite another. Our reaction̵= 2;or lack of reaction—is just as much of a threat as the overt belligerenc= e of Massawi & Co. A few days after 9/11, I was talking with a friend who teaches at Williams College. The respon= se on campus there, as on so many campuses across the country, was shock, dismay,= and outrage—partly at what had happened at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania, but even more at what has come to be called Islamophobia. At Williams, my friend told me, one distraught colleague insisted that the college air movies about the internm= ent of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a warning about the G= reat Backlash Against Muslims that was just about to = sweep the country.

Not just this country, either. T= his past summer, BBC was preparing a film version of John Buchan’s = great “shocker” Greenmantle, whose plot turns on supposed Germ= an efforts to stir Turkish Muslims to jihad during the First World War. All was going along swimmingly until July 7, when some real-life British Muslims detonated themselves on the Lo= ndon transport system. Reaction at the BBC? They canceled the show for fear of wounding the feelings of Muslims.

While we are waiting for that ba= cklash, and humming “Let’s Not Be Beastly to the Muslims,” it is worth noting the word “Islamophobia”= ; is a misnomer. A phobia describes an irrational fear, and it is axiomatic that fearing the effects of radical Islam is not irrational, but on the contrary very well-founded indeed, so that if you want to speak of a legitimate phob= ia—it’s a phobia I experience frequently—we should speak instead of Islamophobia-phobia, the fear of and revulsion toward= s Islamophobia.

Now that fear is very well founded, and it extends into the nooks and crannies of daily life. A couple= of months ago, for example, I read in a London paper that “Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet” because t= he presence of images of our porcine friends offended Muslims. A councillor called Mahbubur Rahman told the paper that he backed the ban because = it represented “tolerance of people’s beliefs.” In other wor= ds, Piglet really did meet a Heffalump, and it turn= s out he was wearing a kaffiyeh.
The observation—often, though apparently inaccurately, attributed to Geor= ge Orwell—that the triumph of evil requires only that good men stand by = and do nothing has special relevance at a time, like now, that is inflected by terrorism. I have several friends—thoughtful, well-intentioned people—who believe the United States should never have intervened in Afghanistan, who believe even more staunchly that the United States should never have intervened in Iraq, and, moreover, that we should get out forthw= ith. “We should,” they believe, “keep to ourselves. We have no business meddling with the rest of the world. We cannot be the world’s constabulary, nor should we aspire to be. It is not in our interest—f= or it breeds resentment—and it is not in the interest of those we profes= s to help, since they should be allowed to govern themselves—or not, as the case may be.”

Whatever the wisdom of the posit= ion in the abstract (and I have my doubts about it), the resurgence of internation= al terrorism, fueled by hate and devoted to death, renders it otiose. Last summer’s bombings in Lon= don were, as these things go, relatively low in casualties. But they were high = in indiscriminateness. The people on those buses and subway cars were as innoc= ent as innocent can be: just folks, moms and dads and children on their way to = work or school or play, as uninterested, most of them, in politics or Islam as i= t is possible to be. And yet those home-grown Islamicists were happy to blow them to bits.

Here is the novelty: Our new ene= mies are not political enemies in any traditional sense, belligerent in the service = of certain interests of their own. Their belligerence is focused rather on the very existence of an alternative to their vision of beatitude, namely on Western democracy and its commitment to individual freedom and economic prosperity. I return to Hussein Massawi: “= ;We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”

In fact, the situation is even g= rimmer than Mr. Massawi suggests. For our new enemies = are not simply bent on our destruction: they are pleased to compass their own destruction as a collateral benefit. This is one of those things that makes Islamofascism a particularly toxic form of totalitarianism. At least most Communists had some rudimentary attachment to the principle of self-preservation. In the face of such death-embracing fanaticism our only option is unremitting combat.

The large issue here is one that has bedeviled liberal societies ever since the= re were liberal societies: namely, that in attempting to create the maximally toler= ant society, we also give scope to those who would prefer to create the maximal= ly intolerant society.

In these pages last June, I wrot= e about the philosopher Leszek Kol= akowski. Let me conclude by returning to what I said there. In an essay called “The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society,” = Kolakowski dilates on this basic antinomy of liberalism. Liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even (it would seem) those points of view whose succe= ss would destroy liberalism. But tolerance to those points of view is a prescription for suicide. Intolerance betrays the fundamental premise of liberalism, i.e., openness. As Robert Frost once put it, a liberal is someo= ne who refuses to take his own part in an argument.

Kolakowski<= /span> is surely right that our liberal, pluralist democracy depends for its survival not only on the continued existence of its institutions, but also “on a belief in their value and a widespread w= ill to defend them.” The question is: Do we, as a society, still enjoy th= at belief? Do we possess the requisite will? Or was François Revel right when he said that “Democratic civilization is the first in history to= blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it”? The jury is st= ill out on those questions. A good test is the extent to which we can resolve t= he antinomy of liberalism. And a good start on that problem is the extent to w= hich we realize that the antinomy is, in the business of everyday life, illusory= .

The “openness” that = liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous openness to all points of view: it is not “value neutral.” It need not, indeed it cannot,= say Yes to all comers, to the Islamofascist who aft= er all has his point of view, just as much as the soccer mom, who has hers. Americ= an democracy, for example, affords its citizens great latitude, but great lati= tude is not synonymous with the proposition that “anything goes.” Our society, like every society, is founded on particular positive values—= ;the rule of law, for example, respect for the individual, religious freedom, the separation of church and state. Western democratic society, that is to say,= is rooted in what Kolakowski calls a “vision= of the world.” Part of that vision is a commitment to openness, but open= ness is not the same as indifference.

The problem is that large portio= ns of Western society, especially those portions entrusted with perpetuating its political and cultural capital, have lost sight of that vision. In part, I believe, this is a religious problem—more to the point, it is a probl= em consequent upon the failure of religion. In his essay “Targeted Jihad” below, Douglas Murray summarizes this point well. <= /span>

It may be no sin—may= indeed be one of our society’s most appealing traits—that we love life. But the scales, as in so many things, have tipped to an extreme. From seein= g so much for which we would live, people in our society now see fewer and fewer causes for which they would die. We have passed to a point where prolongati= on is all. We have become like the parents of Admetos in Euripides’ Alcestis—“w= alking cadavers,” unwilling to give up the few remaining days (in EuropeR= 17;s case, of its peace dividend) even if only by doing so can any generational future be assured. Even the interventionist wars of the West only seem poss= ible when we can ensure that our troops kill but do not die for the cause in han= d. wrong.

In fact, I believe that Mr= . Murray may overstate the extent to which we in the West “love life.” We love our pleasures, which isn’t quite the same thing. But his main po= int, about there being fewer and fewer things for which we would be willing to r= isk our lives, is exactly right. James Burnham made a similar point about facing down the juggernaut of Communism: “just possibly we shall not have to= die in large numbers to stop them: but we shall certainly have to be willing to die.” The issue, Burnham saw, is that modern liberalism has equipped = us with an ethic too abstract and empty to inspire real commitment. Modern liberalism, he writes,

does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for person= al suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its pictur= e of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history… . And it= is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions—pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries= , saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humani= ty in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Secur= ity payments.

The I= slamofascists have a fanatical belief that theirs is a holy mission, that incinerating infidels is their bounden duty. For them suicide is a gateway to paradise. = For us suicide is just that: suicide. Although we began by calling this symposi= um “Threats to Democracy,” it became clear in the course of our pr= oceedings that the threat was larger, more encompassing than that title suggests. As = the succeeding essays make clear, what we are dealing with is the real culture war—a war, as Burnham said, “for survival.” In “It’s the demography, stupid,” Mark <= span class=3DSpellE>Steyn writes about the West’s survival in the m= ost elemental sense: much of what could once upon a time have been called Chris= tian Europe is simply failing to reproduce itself. “A society that has no children,” he notes, “has no future.” But the demographic= timebomb, as Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton, and Keith Windshuttle note, is only part of the story. As Scruton puts it, a kind of “mor= al obesity” cripples much of Western culture, “to the point where ideals and long-term goals induce in them nothing more than a flummoxed bre= athlessness.”

The question is whether we belie= ve anything with sufficient vigor to jettison the torpor of our barren self-satisfaction. There are signs that the answer is Y= es, but you won’t see them on CNN or read about them in <= i>The New York Times. The people presiding over such institutions would rather die than acknowledge that someone like James Burnham (to say nothing of Geo= rge W. Bush) was right. It just may come to that.

Notes
“Threats to Democracy: Then and Now,” a sympo= sium organized jointly by The New Criterion and London’s Social Aff= airs Unit, took place on October 21, 2005 at the Union League Club in New York C= ity. Participants were Max Boot, Robert H. Bork, Michael W. Gleba, Anthony Glees, Roger Kimball, Herbert I. London, Kenneth Minogue, Michael Mosbacher, Douglas Murray, James Piereson, Daniel Pipes, Roger Sc= ruton, Mark Steyn, and Keith Wind= schuttle. Discussion revolved largely around earlier versions of the essays printed in this special section.

Article printed from The New Criterion: http://newcriterion.com

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